Search

The first post in the theme can be found here. If you haven't done much styling of controls before then I recommend you start there since it introduces practices to keep your styles manageable.
This far in the series, I'm focusing on specific parts of the more complex controls.
In this post, we are branching out into the Silverlight Toolkit to style the Accordian control.

A customer contacted me a few days ago asking how to display text labels on a NumericAxis. (Whereas CategoryAxis makes it easy to use text labels for the independent axis, this request was about text labels on the dependent axis.) It's a bit of an unusual request (I spent a minute just now and don't see how to accomplish this in Excel), but I knew it would be easy to do with the Charting controls in the Data Visualization assembly that's part of the Silverlight Toolkit and WPF Toolkit.

It’s been a while since Silverlight Toolkit has Theming support, but with the April 2010 version and the new features of Silverlight 4 it is now easier than ever to apply those themes.

What you need to know:

• ImplicitStyleManager was removed from the Toolkit, this is because implicit styles are now supported in Silverlight 4.
• The Toolkit has now a Theme control to apply Themes on your pages.
• Also a ContextMenuService and ContextMenu control that can allow the user to switch Themes at runtime in this scenario.

This brings the new features from the Silverlight 4 version to developers who have a business reason to continue with Silverlight 3 development for the time being:

• Updated user interface
• Integrated “tag expression” support for selecting subsets of tests to run
• Performance improvements
• Removal of dependencies on XLinq and System.Windows.Browser assemblies

Silverlight 4 now adds support for MouseRightButtonDown and the MouseRightButtonUp events on all UIElements. The Silverlight Toolkit (April Release) also introduces the ContextMenu control to Silverlight developers. In this article, we will see how to

•             Use the ContextMenu control released in the Silverlight 4 Toolkit
•     Display the ContextMenu on a TextBox by using the new Right-Click mouse event support in Silverlight 4
•    Access the clipboard programmatically (new in Silverlight 4) to do Cut, Copy and Paste operations on a TextBox

Note, for this tutorial, you will also need to download and install RX Extensions from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee794896.aspx, and the Silverlight Toolkit from: http://silverlight.codeplex.com.

As with the last tutorial, we will not use a database, just a simple collection that we are creating programmatically. This will allow you to see just the oData parts.

So, What is this Busy Indicator? Busy indicator is a tool which you can add in your Silverlight application to show a loading indication to your user while saving some sort of operation in database. Generally it is useful when you calling your WCF Service to store something in server or retrieving some data from server.

In this article, I am going to discuss with you regarding the Drag and Drop functionality inside a Silverlight ListBox control. This article will also cover the Drag and Drop operation between two ListBox control. We will use here the Silvelright 4 Toolkit to implement the feature. 

Trying to create a modern, clean and crisp user interface is a challenge – and it’s something that Zune has done rather well in both their software and hardware experiences.

I took a few minutes to experiment with new Silverlight 4 features, including the new Silverlight Toolkit (April 2010 release) that includes a context menu control, to re-style/re-template the menu to look similar to a few other menus.